RCG Blog To The Point

Looking Like A Big Deal…Before You Are

Posted on November 12, 2013

The proliferation of ways to publish your magnum opus (or, you know, an exhaustive detailing of your whole two and a half decades of life experience) has been both a blessing and a curse. It allows talented voices an outlet directly to the audience; we’ll skip the fact that it allows the spectacularly untalented a way into print. Vanity publishing used to keep all but the well-heeled hack out of that sandbox.

But we digress. This blog post is about finding clever ways to bring attention to a self-published author, with the end goal of interesting a mainstream publisher in either picking up the work or future works. Then again, if the campaign is successful, perhaps that mainstream publisher becomes much less enticing or even necessary.

We worked recently with the anonymous author of a book about her experiences as a drug addict. It is a sobering book with a message of hope, forgiveness, and redemption. She financed the publishing of her book in paperback and e-book herself, and was savvy enough to know that if she could put some of her savings into professionally designed marketing materials, she would look like the product of a mainstream publisher, which translates into instant credibility with many consumers.

Complicating matters was that the book is anonymous, which means no lovely dust jacket photo — and a somewhat vague bio. We decided together that we would do the following things to help promote her book: an attention-getting book cover, a website, a Facebook page, a YouTube channel, a media kit, and a series of testimonial videos.

Remember that anonymous thing? It somewhat complicates the production of book trailers and testimonials. But through lighting, lenses, and post-production tinkering with their voices and appearances, we were able to preserve the identities of six people, who could then speak 100% candidly about how they feel about the book, how they feel about the author, and what it was like to deal with the author at the height of her addiction and as she struggled to recover. It allowed the author to speak about her experience dredging up painful episodes from her past, and about those episodes themselves, without endangering her high-paying, high-profile career. Here’s a sample:

The sum total of those marketing tools resulted in one of the largest and most nationally recognized non-profit providers of alcohol and drug addiction treatment lending the author its support of her book through promotion in its newsletters and e-communications, and sales in its treatment centers, bookstores, and at its engagements. And that’s a big deal.